Title:
POWERPLAY: Training an Increasingly General Problem Solver by Continually Searching for the Simplest Still Unsolvable Problem

Abstract: Most of computer science focuses on automatically solving given computational
problems. I focus on automatically inventing or discovering problems in a way
inspired by the playful behavior of animals and humans, to train a more and
more general problem solver from scratch in an unsupervised fashion. Consider
the infinite set of all computable descriptions of tasks with possibly
computable solutions. The novel algorithmic framework POWERPLAY (2011)
continually searches the space of possible pairs of new tasks and modifications
of the current problem solver, until it finds a more powerful problem solver
that provably solves all previously learned tasks plus the new one, while the
unmodified predecessor does not. Wow-effects are achieved by continually making
previously learned skills more efficient such that they require less time and
space. New skills may (partially) re-use previously learned skills. POWERPLAY's
search orders candidate pairs of tasks and solver modifications by their
conditional computational (time & space) complexity, given the stored
experience so far. The new task and its corresponding task-solving skill are
those first found and validated. The computational costs of validating new
tasks need not grow with task repertoire size. POWERPLAY's ongoing search for
novelty keeps breaking the generalization abilities of its present solver. This
is related to Goedel's sequence of increasingly powerful formal theories based
on adding formerly unprovable statements to the axioms without affecting
previously provable theorems. The continually increasing repertoire of problem
solving procedures can be exploited by a parallel search for solutions to
additional externally posed tasks. POWERPLAY may be viewed as a greedy but
practical implementation of basic principles of creativity. A first
experimental analysis can be found in separate papers [53,54].

Comments:

21 pages, additional connections to previous work, references to first experiments with POWERPLAY